The War

Mississippi in 1970, and a family is trying to reassemble itself around a father back from Vietnam. He cannot find work, cannot sleep and cannot tell his children what happened over there. The children are conducting their own war, feuding with another family in town over the treehouse they have built in the woods. The idea is to set those two beside each other. The adults' war is over and still working on them, while the children's is only starting, and stopping it is precisely what the father is trying to teach. Kevin Costner plays him and Elijah Wood is his son. Jon Avnet leans hard on sentiment, and even the best passages are pushed along by the score. The argument for peace is stated outright rather than implied. Even so, the sequence where the treehouse fight turns is honest. The children repeat the same helplessness and the same pride as their elders, and the film shows it without stopping to explain. Who it is for: viewers who like 1990s family drama. Who it is not for: anyone put off by a message delivered plainly.